Dove, a brand known for their positive portrayal of women, is calling out media outlets for criticizing female athlete’s looks—just in time for the 2016 summer Olympics. The “My Beauty, My Say” campaign hopes to change the media’s focus from appearance to performance arguing, “When they [the media] only see an athlete’s looks, they don’t see her at all.” Dove shares real-time quotes on social media, sportscasts, and magazines by popular media entities like TMZ and Bleacher Report, and offers viewers a chance to respond to these quotes. They range from discussing a female athlete’s “frizzy hair” to saying a female athlete is “built like a fire hydrant.”

Some may believe critiquing athlete’s looks or attire is just part of being in the public eye, but where do we draw the line? Since April 1, 2016 there have been 86.5 million comments about female athlete’s appearance according to http://www.dovehaveyoursay.com. Instead of focusing on their athletic performance, here’s the breakdown of what’s being discussed:

Clothes: 11%

Body: 26%

Age: 6%

Beauty: 50%

Hair: 7%

When 50% of the discussion surrounding female athletes is solely focused on their appearance, it’s time for a change. A woman’s level of attractiveness or appearance has no bearing on her abilities as an athlete. By focusing on her beauty or body, the media takes away from her hard work and abilities as a professional athlete. Dove put the ball in our court (pun intended), bringing attention to the current offensive approach to women’s athletic coverage, to drive change. It’s time to take the shot: http://www.dovehaveyoursay.com

By 2018, 69 percent of total Internet traffic will be video. Every minute, 48 hours of video are being uploaded to YouTube. From 2012 to 2014, mobile video views increased by 400 percent.

These facts are hard to ignore when video is taking over the world as it holds the highest CTR of all digital advertising formats. But how can brands turn these statistics into forms of engagement with current and potential customers? How can brands constantly create content to combat the Internet’s flood of video content? How do brands master the infamous viral video?

So many questions yet so little time to create interactive, high quality videos! Videos have exploded on social media because they are so engaging, especially User Generated Content. Think about GoPro (Case Study), as the brand mission is to capture the user’s most exciting and extreme moments. Hours upon hours of GoPro footage have been uploaded to YouTube to share experiences with current and potential customers of the brand. These customers directly market the brand through UGC, which builds a huge momentum of exposure for GoPro to go beyond a restricted snowboarding or surfing brand. The views of the UGC turned branded content have directly increased with the company’s sales. Brands need to learn from companies that are using their trusted and personalized UGC and earned media for advertising purposes. If brands can accomplish that feat, they will thrive in the flood of videos taking over our social channels.

Secondly, how do brands create enough content to stay current with the trends and compete with the billions of videos on the web? It’s not enough to simply be creating meaningless content, instead, brands need to be consistently creating and sharing great content. Unfortunately, there’s no quick formula to make amazing, engaging content. Brands must completely understand their own personality and how it can provide value to their potential or current customers. An audience analysis, content audit, competitive analysis and content planning are essential steps in the process to determine how the brand’s videos will positively reach the audience. All of these strategy and planning steps eventually lead to content creation that’s interactive and easily sharable. Check out these great examples of content marketing to get started!

Lastly, brands can conquer the viral video by simply changing their approach. Again, UGC or ‘found footage’ must be utilized to humanize branded content. For example, Android’s viral “Friends Furever” was composed entirely of UGC of unusual animals interacting with each other and was the most shared ad of 2015. Brands can now find previously existing UGC that can be molded to fit a brand’s ethos. Instead of paying an agency millions to create a commercial with expensive celebrity endorsers, brands can now choose relatable, realistic videos.

A brand that does not use video marketing is like eating a PB&J sandwich without the jelly—it just doesn’t make sense and it gets you nowhere. Our digital world is expanding and there’s not much room for growth without video content marketing. Brands can easily reach and engage with their target audience if they take advantage of UGC, create a content strategy, and just possibly, conquer the viral video

Selena Gomez is 24 years old and a single post from this former Disney star is worth more than most people make in a year, two years, three years… A single promoted post from her is worth $550,000, which tops the list of all celebrities – including the Kardashian/Jenner clan. This value is based off D’Marie Group’s algorithm that takes into consideration 56 metrics. These include: followers, post frequency, engagement, post quality, click through and potential to create sales. So although Gomez is not guaranteed to make half a million dollars on every sponsored post, she essentially could use that as a starting point for negotiations.

You’re probably asking yourself, how can a social media post be worth so much money? (Or if you’re me, how can MY posts be worth even 1/100th of that?) There are several factors to Selena Gomez’s monetary value. First, she has 200 million followers on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook who are actively engaging on her accounts. (Not to mention on average, 200,000 more join them every day, increasing the total number of her followers daily.) Brands will pay big bucks to have their product placed in front of that many people – especially if they’re conditioned to engage with the content that typically is pushed out from the page. According to AdWeek, users trust influencers as much as their friends, and around 40% say they have purchased something because they saw an influencer using it. These influencers are seen as real people, and their fans trust them, even if they’re being paid to promote a product. The relationship social media creates between influencers and their followers makes every suggestion feel personal, so if Selena Gomez says to buy a product, her fanbase is likely to do so.

Gomez isn’t involved in many brand partnerships. She’s (or at least her management is) selective about what brands she endorses. Right now that includes Coca-Cola, Pantene, and Kmart. Her feed isn’t diluted with promoted posts. According to D’Marie Group a post by Selena Gomez, or supermodel (and Kardashian) Kendall Jenner, will produce 12x the return on investment compared to standard digital marketing efforts.

Here are a few other top celebrity endorsers on social media:

Kendall Jenner: $125,000 – $300,000 per post

Cara Delevigne: $125,000 – $300,000 per post

Taylor Swift: $125,000 – $300,000 per post

Gigi Hadid: $125,000 – $300,000 per post

Scott Disick: $15,000 – $20,000 per post

Kim Kardashian: $20,000 per tweet

Khloe Kardashian: $13,000 per tweet

Ashley Benson: $5,200 per tweet

Did anyone else die a little inside after that? If you need me, I’ll be working on my Instagram.

As millennials, we’re expected to be the all-knowers of the digital world. We’re on the pulse of social media, and we’re expected to keep up with the downloads and be down with the uploads. It’s pretty crazy – no wonder those Boomers would rather us do it. As tail end millennials and Gen Z-ers are becoming old enough to enter the workforce, it’s easy to see that many of us have difficulties with social etiquette.

For starters, a lot of younger folks struggle with giving away all the information they possibly can share about themselves online. (We’ve all been guilty of it one time or another.) Being comfortable with yourself is a great quality, but it’s important to keep some personal things off the web. My simple test is: Is it something your future employers or grandparents would want to know about you? If the answer is no, don’t tweet about it. I’m glad you’re having a great time on Saturday at 3:17AM, but alerting everyone online that you’re blacked out and can’t find your shirt is not the best call. That’s a story to tell where no one can screenshot it – like in person.

It always makes me laugh when people say “I post what I want, it won’t stop me from getting a job!” I’ve talked to a plethora of employers, and every one of them goes to the fabulous tool we know and love: Google. It takes 2 seconds to type in your name and find out everything about you online. If you don’t have a personal page, odds are your Twitter or Facebook will be the first thing to come up. If it’s not protected, keep it PG-13 – use the employer/grandparents test if you’re not sure. It’s only going to get worse as tech savvy people step into positions of power. No one finds online information faster than millennials with a bone to pick; imagine one as your boss.

So the lesson learned is to be responsible, but that doesn’t mean you have to act like a robot. It’s good to add some personal flair to your social media pages and show people you are a real human. Let people see that you coach basketball in your free time and you love sharing pictures of your dog. Just don’t share everything because “Revealing too much leaves you with nothing.”

As some may say, Pokémon Go motivated more American kids to get off the couch in one week than the last seven years of Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign. Even though these kids are glued to their phones, they are actually going outside and walking around! American kids exercising at their own free will – what is happening to the world? The mobile application has taken over the nation as one of the most viral applications of all time. In fact, the number of active daily users on Pokémon Go has topped Twitter and sees more engagement than Facebook!

So what is so special about Pokémon Go and how is it surpassing powerful social media tools? Well, the app uses location-based augmented reality to engage users into capturing, training and battling virtual Pokémon that appear in real-world settings. As a player travels throughout the real world, the player’s avatar moves along the game’s map to find Pokémon near the player’s location. Pokémon show up on the player’s screen in real settings where players can capture them with Pokéballs. Sounds fun right? Yes, but warning: it’s highly addictive to “Catch them all.”

The images above show what the game looks like from the user’s perspective. The far left represents the real-life augmented reality and middle and right screens show the virtual maps.

Since the game uses augmented reality, it is engaging users with the technology of both the real and virtual world of the game in one place. Many establishments have seen a boost in business, especially in walking-accessible cities like NYC and Chicago. Niantic, the company that created the game, wants to offer businesses an even more powerful method of bringing new customers into businesses through Pokémon Go. Soon establishments will be able to become “sponsored” spots in the game that will drive sales and traffic even further. These businesses would pay the company to become locations within the virtual game board with the promise of more foot traffic.

The high engagement level of the game has advertisers interested as a perfect place to target their audience. When locations are sponsored on the game, advertisers could pay per visit, similar to the pay per click on Google’s search ads. The potential for paid advertising that encourage players to visit a business or store is a huge opportunity! More details will be coming soon from Niantic, so keep a look out for new advertising opportunities within the interactive app. Whoever would have thought that Pokémon would become a phenomenon twenty years after the first game on Gameboy was released!

The people have spoken and Snapchat has listened. If you’re on social media, you’ve seen the conversation—Snapchat users wishing to rewatch stories and see images past their current disposable nature. The popular messaging app’s newest update will allow for just that. Users can save photos and videos to a newly launched “Memories” page on their app. They can choose to keep images to view later, resend an image or video, and even edit captions.

Snapchat also installed the ability to photo search for simple terms in the images within Memories. If you take a video of your dog, simply type in “dog,” and all those adorable images will pop right up. (If only Apple had that capability…)

Memories will show users data they’ve saved from the past, much like the TimeHop app. Any images users put into their Memories folder will show up on the app on the same date in the future. This “blast from the past” idea has been a well-liked update to Facebook as well. Even better, users can combine their stories to make one long video to share. A lifelong friend’s birthday roast seems like the perfect use for this feature.

Snapchat is consistently improving it’s offerings, giving more incentive for users to stay within their app longer, or for light users like me to get on more often. Snapchat is even growing rapidly among users over age 35. The continued improvements to the application will allow Snapchat to see user growth and soon, Snapchat might be the next Facebook contender. Stay tuned…